A drunken brawl with his equerry. A married mistress, secret hotel assignations, an illegitimate child — surely our brand-new hero Prince Harry isn’t up to his old tricks again already?

Thankfully not. But details emerged this week of another Prince Harry — the Queen’s uncle, not her grandson — which shed light on the pressures of life as a royal soldier and which demonstrate that, in the House of Windsor, change does not come quickly.

Extraordinarily, it’s the sale of a small pair of gilt cufflinks which have brought to light just how our Prince Harry has, by comparison with his namesake, comported himself with rather more decorum than we might previously have given him credit for.

Flying prince: The Duke of Gloucester Prince Henry got into a fight with his loyal equerry after being told to choose a wife against his wishes

After all, we haven’t heard of him sharing the bed of a married woman with his elder brother. Or creating a love-nest outside the back door of Buckingham Palace. Or splashing out the equivalent of £1 million to pay for a love-child.

Prince Harry, Duke of Gloucester, third son of George V, did all of that and more, and got away with it. Yet it has taken an auction in a Salisbury saleroom for the comparisons to come out.

Lot number 1384 in Woolley and Wallis’s sale today is a handsome pair of monogrammed cufflinks — the sort of desirable trinket royalty used to hand out to friends and devoted courtiers. The cufflinks owe their presence in the saleroom thanks to their connection to a hitherto undisclosed punch-up between the prince and his equerry at Hillsborough Castle in County Down in the summer of 1934.

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In front of their appalled host, the Duke of Abercorn, the two men, dressed in white tie and tails, waded into each other and had to be pulled apart by a beefy aide-de-camp. Drink, inevitably, had been taken.

The mists of time, alas, conceal the exact words exchanged between the two old friends. But the demands of trying to be both a royal prince and a soldier — the very thing young Prince Harry was trying to explain about his own life this week — had a lot to do with it.

Like his young relation, old Harry was
an ambitious officer in a cavalry regiment, trying to make his way in a
profession which respected royalty but also put it to the test. Then,
as now, the conflict of royal duty versus commitment to his
brothers-in-arms made for hard choices.

At
34, old Harry’s greatest wish was to command his regiment. But public
duties kept getting in the way, and in the summer of 1934 he was in
Northern Ireland undertaking a diary of engagements which would make
modern-day royals blanch.

Namesake: Prince Harry, pictured at Camp Bastion, Afghanistan, shares his love of the Army with his great uncle the Duke of Gloucester

There had been five days of pressing the flesh, listening to boring speeches, rebuffing the attentions of Ulster matrons. In addition, Harry had learned that a three-month tour of Australasia handed to brother George was being passed over to him — because George was ‘exhausted’ from a tour of South Africa.

It meant his chances of promotion within the 10th Hussars were pushed back by at least a year. At Hillsborough Castle the anger and frustration finally boiled over: the prince and his devoted equerry, a Cambridge-educated Canadian called Howard Kerr, came to blows and had to be pulled apart.

The root of it all was Harry’s infatuation with a married woman, Mrs Beryl Markham. Some years earlier he’d travelled to Kenya with his eldest brother, the Prince of Wales — later Edward VIII — on a safari which morphed into a babes ’n’ booze-fest that would put the present-day Harry’s Vegas larks in the shade.

The royal brothers shared the bed (thankfully on different evenings) of Mrs Markham, daughter of a Happy Valley racehorse trainer and unusually a woman who’d made a name for herself as a pilot. Striking rather than beautiful, she had a voracious appetite for men.

But while the Prince of Wales had the sense to move on, Harry could not: he made her his long-time mistress. Though her life was centred on Kenya, he paid for a permanent suite at the Grosvenor Hotel, a five-minute walk from the back gates of Buckingham Palace, so that he could simply move in with her.

Some time later, it emerged that she was pregnant. ‘People naturally assumed, with the Duke always in and out of her suite, even going to the nursing home the day the child was born, that it was his,’ wrote her friend Ginger Birkbeck.

Beryl, of course, had a husband — and his family were incandescent that she’d blackened the family name by giving birth to a royal bastard.

Queen Mary, pictured at the Royal Military College, Sanhurst, with a young Prince Henry, had to shell out the equivalent of £1million on a child rumoured to have been fathered by the Duke of Gloucester

There was an angry showdown at the Palace between Beryl’s husband and Harry’s mother Queen Mary after the head of Beryl’s family — baronet Sir Charles Markham — threatened to reveal the contents of letters sent by the prince.

‘Old Queen Mary opened her purse-strings,’ observed a family friend, and a sum equivalent to £1 million today was settled on Beryl for the upbringing of her son. She was paid the interest until her death in 1986, never once revealing that the child had not been fathered by Harry, a fact the scheming Mrs Markham knew all along.

But Harry was reckless, and rather proud of himself for having — so he thought — fathered a son. Queen Mary, however, was outraged.

She soon sent her son a short-list of European princesses and ordered him to take his pick. On top of that, Harry had just been informed his brother Georgie was ‘too tired’ to go to Australia.

‘This hit him twice over,’ wrote an old friend. ‘Harry was being asked to be a substitute for his effete brother when all he wanted to do was get back to soldiering. He had high hopes of commanding the regiment, and didn’t want to jeopardise that by spending months away from home. And Beryl was due back in England and he was aching to see her.’

Thus, with Harry in militant mood, Howard Kerr probably went too far that day at Hillsborough Castle in 1934 when he suggested life would be so much easier if the prince just got himself a wife — and that there was an ideal girl to hand.

She was the daughter of a Scottish grandee, the Duke of Buccleuch. Maybe Lady Alice Montagu-Douglas-Scott was, at 34, a little long in the tooth but the Buccleuchs were the biggest landowners in Europe and, in Border country, held more sway than the Royal Family.

Harry didn’t like the idea. He’d met the girl. He’d met her sisters, too, all four of them, and there wasn’t anything to choose between them. He was in no hurry to cast off his bachelor status — he saw himself as a bit of a ladies’ man.

Wasn’t the mother of his son, Beryl
Markham, about to fly back to London from Kenya and take up residence in
their old suite at the Grosvenor Hotel? Maybe this was the moment when
Kerr told old Harry to wake up and smell the coffee. And as a
consequence his master took a swing at him.

Despite his infatuation with Mrs Beryl Markham, who also shared the bed of his elder brother Edward VIII, Prince Henry married Princess Alice in 1935, pictured

And the confrontation seems to have spurred Harry to face up to his responsibilities. On his return from the hated Australian tour months later in 1935, Harry went to stay with his friend Teddy Brook at Kinmount Castle in the Borders. There, by design, was Lady Alice.

‘That was when we became engaged,’ she recalled, rather glumly. ‘There was no formal declaration on his part. I think he just muttered it as an aside during one of our walks. He certainly didn’t shower me with flowers because that was not his way.’

Not like he’d showered Beryl Markham with champagne and jewels, that’s for sure. Harry had been cornered — by circumstance, by his overbearing parents, by the whole ruddy royal apparatus.

The marriage was a success — it lasted 38 years until his death in 1974 — but it might be concluded that Harry cared less about life after that. Could it be that in his dotage, he still looked back on that bout of fisticuffs as a turning-point?

Certainly, he regarded the clash with Howard Kerr as regrettable, for the aide-de-camp who pulled them apart was sent the cufflinks as a mark of gratitude. Then, as an afterthought, he was also made a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, a considerable honour.

Harry got a gong as well. He was made a Knight of St Patrick, the Irish equivalent of the Garter, for those few hectic days in Ulster. It sat prettily on his heavily-bemedalled chest, for the Duke in his dotage took consolation in a glass of wine and wearing impressive uniforms.

Let us hope that on his return from Afghanistan, Harry Wales might look at his great-great-uncle’s adventures, and draw valuable lessons about the responsibilities that come with being a Prince of the realm.